The present invention relates to a semiconductor device, an encoding control method, and a camera device. For example, the present invention relates to a semiconductor device, an encoding control method, and a camera device that are associated with encoding of input data.
In recent years, semiconductor devices have been widely used to encode video data by controlling the subsequent encoding rate according to the results of the last encoding. As a technique for encoding control, for example, Patent Document 1 (Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Publication No. Hei 10 (1998)-208393) is known.
Patent Document 1 discloses a technique for a video encoder that records a bit stream of encoded video signals into an optical disk. The video encoder according to Patent Document 1 is configured such that a video encoder encodes an input image data based on a specified amount of bits to be encoded, and stores the encoded bit stream, which is the encoding result, into an encoder buffer (a transmission buffer). Here, when recording to the recording medium is temporarily interrupted due to an external impact or the like, the output from the encoder buffer is temporarily stopped. At this time, a buffer management circuit calculates the occupancy of data in the encoder buffer, based on the amount of encoded bits as well as the output bit rate in the encoder buffer. Then, a rate controller controls the encoded bit rate in the video encoder according to the occupancy.